Month: December 2011

A company to consider if you’re looking for beer to sample: a brewery that ships nation wide. Please check how they ship and how if mght affect you: some states vary in their rules and maybe your state might have a problem, the Feds can be picky and if they ship by telling the company something else is in the carton that could be problematic for ALL!

No writer attributed. Posted at blog.seattlepi.com

American Brewing Company is now selling its beer online and shipping it across the country. There’s more to it than that, but the short version is that you can now send a case of Breakaway IPA to Uncle Bubba in Bakersfield or to Aunt Wilma in Walla Walla. You can also send a case of Caboose Oatmeal Stout, American Blond, or a mixed case of all three. Beerjobber.com is the website making this possible.

Written by Erica Meltzer for dailycamera.com

On Christmas Day, the Walnut Brewery closes for a miracle.

Every year — for the past 10 years — the downtown eatery, part of the Rock Bottom Restaurants group, serves up a free holiday meal with all the fixings to homeless people and needy families in Boulder County.

The preparations start two days before, and the dozens of volunteers show up at 6 a.m. on Christmas Day, giving up a holiday with their families, to get ready for the 11 a.m. opening.

There was 150 pounds each of turkey and ham, 275 pounds of mashed potatoes, 12 gallons of gravy, 225 pounds of stuffing and 30 pounds of cranberry sauce.

Pam Thom, left, of Longmont, and Bob VonEschen, of Boulder, right, serve up dinner plates during the Miracle on Walnut Street Christmas dinner on Sunday at the Walnut Brewery in Boulder. ( Jeremy Papasso)Each of the 519 guests — from the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless, from Longmont’s Inn Between, from

Pam Thom, left, of Longmont, and Bob VonEschen, of Boulder, right, serve up dinner plates during the Miracle on Walnut Street Christmas dinner on Sunday at the Walnut Brewery in Boulder. ( Jeremy Papasso)

Bridge House, from SafeHouse Progressive Alliance for Non-violence and walk-ins from off the street — were greeted warmly and asked if they would like some dinner.This year, there were more guests than usual. The event typically feeds around 450 people.

“We’re proud of how we do it,” said Brion Boyer, general manager of Walnut Brewery, 1123 Walnut St. “Most of the work happens before. Once you open the doors, it’s relaxing and fun.”

Miracle on Walnut Street is one of seven similar events around the country put on by Rock Bottom Foundation, the charitable arm of Rock Bottom Restaurants, which include Old Chicago Restaurants, the ChopHouse and others. The foundation is dedicated to fighting hunger.

Don Lawrence, a Littleton attorney, has played Santa — posing for photos with children and adults alike — at Miracle on Walnut Street for the last five years, starting when his daughter, Jaki Lawrence, worked at Walnut Brewery.

Written by David Ranii for newsobserver.com

Beer Prophet is an app for the iPhone and iPad that sells for 99 cents and was created by a quartet of Triangle entrepreneurs. What it does is recommend beers you’re likely to enjoy based on your past preferences. And you can continuously update your taste profile by making entries about your likes and dislikes in a personal beer journal as you give new brews a try.

“The more you use it, the better it becomes for you,” said John Federal, who has worked on Beer Prophet. Federal’s day job is manager of American Brewmaster, a Raleigh store that caters to people who make beer and wine at home.

Beer Prophet grew out of a conversation that Pete Pagano, owner of Tir Na Nog Irish pub in downtown Raleigh, had with a friend. They were discussing how to best serve customers seeking suggestions of what beers they would like based on the brews they already know they like.

Pagano and his buddy recruited two tech-savvy friends and formed Zooqini, the company behind Beer Prophet. Each of them is an equal partner in the business, but for now the others prefer not to be named, Pagano said.

Owners and brewer Bonnie and Don Bradley inside the fermentation tank room at The Moon Under Water Brewpub in Victoria, BC. Picture credit: Chad Hipolito for The Globe and Mail

Written by Tom Hawthorn for theglobeandmail.com

A private liquor store in Oak Bay promotes the sale of locally brewed ales and lagers in what it calls the “two-mile beer diet.”

At long last, a diet I can follow.

Let’s go to the source. Drive along busy Bay Street to the Rock Bay industrial corridor. Stop at a commercial strip mall. Across the street is a gravel yard. In a nondescript cinderblock building, a former Direct Buy showroom has been transformed into a pub.

Suds with a sack of sliders? White Castle is testing beer and wine sales at one of its stores in Indiana. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)

Written by Evan S. Benn for post-dispatch.com and stltoday.com

The holidays are normally a slow time for news, which is why so many media outlets resort to year-end “listicles” to tide you over. Not so with beer news, apparently, which came at a furious pace this week. Here’s a recap of what you may have missed from around the country:

• A federal judge in Texas struck down a longtime Lone Star State statute that required breweries to label any beer containing more than 4 percent alcohol by weight “ale” (anything less could be called “beer”). As any beer geek will tell you, all ales are beers, but not all beers are ales (some are lagers). So it was silly that brewers of, say, a Vienna lager had to put “Ale in Texas” on the beer’s label. Not anymore. Calling the requirement a restriction on commercial speech, Judge Sam Sparks compared the antiquated law to “defining the word ‘milk’ to mean ‘a nocturnal flying mammal that eats insects and employs echolocation.’ ” Props to Judge Sparks for making me Google “echolocation,” and to Austin, Texas, craft brewery Jester King, whichhelped champion the litigation against the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

Written by Eric Goldschein for businessinsider.com

Since the 1990s, the craft brewing movement has been slowly taking over the beer-making industry.

Yes, big beer makers are still king, and control more than 93 percent of overall beer sales in the country. But of the 1,600 breweries in the United States today, 90 percent of them are craft brewers.

Craft brewers are, by definition, small, independent and traditional. Their commitment to innovation and community seems to resonate with beer drinkers across the country, who are increasingly flocking to craft beers and even the breweries themselves.

11. Dogfish Head Craft Brewery – Milton, DE

This company began as thesmallest commercial brewery in America, looking to bring original beer and food to the resort community of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware in June of 1995. The brewpub quickly became popular for its quirky flavors and wood-burning grill. A thirty-fold expansion of Dogfish Head was needed within a year.

By 1997, the brewery had separated from the restaurant to focus on brewing beer, and in 1999 the company was producing five year–round bottled brands in about a dozen states. Today, they operate out of a 100,000 square foot factory in Milton, producing beer — and even spirits — for 25 states.

One Bottle Collection beer for every day before Christmas. Rating system: not actually meant as a “tense” comment. All these beers either don’t exist anymore, or I tasted in the past. Hopefully, if not so hot before, they’re better now. If they do still exist. Or hopefully, if not better they’re as dead as the… Dickens.

Note: the ghosts have varied a bit over the various versions, but even Mr. Magoo’s version the Future was bleak. In the pictures chosen for this series the most visually pleasing ghost was Present.

Ghost of Christmas Present… remember him? Jolly, fun: the kind of guy you’d invite to a party for the season, and the kind of beer you could bring to a festive affair and not be totally laughed out of the room by festive beer geeks. That’s the best a beer gets in this series. Now Ghost of Christmas Past isn’t a great award. You can see from the picture he can be a bit of a grump. Probably from mediocre’ beer. And best not bring a Ghost of Christmas Past Beer to a beer geek festive affair. You’ll be the limp wet noodle of the party. A Ghost of Christmas Future beer? You remember that guy, right? If you want to be laughed at, have to bring most of your offering home and feel like you’ve just attended your own funeral instead of a party, bring a Ghost of Christmas Future beer. Some Ghost of Future Beer might best serve as embalming fluid.

Written by Ken Carman

Stark Mill Holiday

Wow. I do remember this. Stark is no longer in business. The last thing I knew Milly’s Tavern replaced it. I would assume some of the owners, or the staff, are the same since they had a beer with Milly’s picture on it: a black Lab I believe. Just an assumption. Looks like they no longer brew this according to Milly’s site. The Facebook page still uses “Stark Brewing.” There’s a coffee concern in the same restaurant: Stark had the same and a coffee beer.

I remember the brewery as a bit cellar-ish. The beer as complex… a lot of malt: deeply dark with a big, multi, grain. The abv was a tad high but not a sink into the alcoholic warmth beer. More just right for the rather substantial body. Just like the hops. Centennial? That’s a little tougher to remember, to be honest. If it twere spiced: not much. I think I would remember that.